Stephen Baxter: Silverhair

The great, stolid legs of Owlheart and Wolfnose stood over Foxeye, and Silverhair felt a huge reassurance that the older Cows were here to help her sister, as they had helped so many mothers before — including her own.

Foxeye’s legs kicked back, and she cried out.

Silverhair stepped back, alarmed. "Is it time?"

Owlheart laid a strong, soothing trunk on Foxeye’s back. "Don’t be afraid, Silverhair. Watch now."

The muscles of Foxeye’s stomach flexed in great waves. Then, with startling suddenness, it began.

A pink-purple fetal sac thrust out of Foxeye’s body. The sac was small, streamlined like a seal, and glistening with fluid. As it pushed in great surges from Foxeye’s pink warmth, it looked more like something from the sea, thought Silverhair, than mammoth blood and bone.

One last heave, and Foxeye expelled the sac. It dropped with a liquid noise to the ground.

Owlheart stepped forward. With clean, confident swipes of her tusks she began to cut open the fetal sac and strip it away.

Foxeye shuddered once more. The afterbirth was expelled, a steaming, bloody mass of flesh. Then Foxeye fell back against the hard, cold ground, closing her eyes, her empty belly heaving with deep, exhausted breaths.

Silverhair watched, fascinated, as the new calf emerged from its sac. The trunk came first, a thin, dark rope. Then came the head, for a moment protruding almost comically from the sac. It was plastered with pale orange hair, soaked with blood and amniotic fluid, and it turned this way and that. Two eyes opened, bright pink disks; then the tiny mouth popped moistly open under the waving trunk.

"Her eyes," Silverhair said softly.

Wolfnose, her great-grandmother, was stroking and soothing Foxeye. "What about her eyes?"

"They’re red."

"So they should be. Everything is as it should be, as it has been since Kilukpuk birthed her last Calves in the Swamp."

The baby was a small bundle of bloody, matted fur, sprawled on the grass. She breathed with wet sucking noises, and her breath steamed; she let out a thin wail of protest and began to scrabble at the ground with her stumpy legs.

Owlheart’s trunk tapped Silverhair’s flank. "Help her, child."

Silverhair stepped forward nervously. She lowered her trunk and wrapped it around the calf’s belly. Her skin was hot, and slick with birthing fluid that was already gathering frost.

With gentle pulling, Silverhair helped the infant stagger to her feet. The calf looked about blindly, mewling.

An infant mammoth, at birth, is already three feet tall. A human baby weighs less than the mammoth’s brain.

"She wants her first suck," Owlheart said softly.

With gentle tugs Silverhair guided the stumbling infant forward.

Foxeye knelt, then stood uncertainly, so that her pendulous dugs hung down before the calf. Silverhair slid her trunk under the calf’s chin, and helped the calf roll her tiny trunk onto her forehead. Soon the baby’s pink mouth had found her mother’s nipple.

"Red eyes," said Foxeye. "Like the rising sun. That’s her name. Sunfire."

Then Silverhair, with Owlheart and Wolfnose, stood by the calf and mother. They kept the infant warm with their bodies, and used their trunks to clean the baby’s hair as she stood amid the rich hair of her mother’s belly, protected by the palisade of the huge legs around her. After a time Foxeye moved away from the reaching calf, encouraging her to walk after her.

And as she watched the infant suckle, Silverhair felt an odd pressure in her own empty dugs.

At the end of the long night, with the deep purple of dawn seeping into the eastern sky, Silverhair broke away from the Cows so she could feed and pass dung.

Wolfnose came wandering over the uneven tundra.

Silverhair, moved by an obscure concern, followed her great-grandmother.

The old Cow, her hair clumpy and matted, tugged fitfully at the trampled grass. But the coordination of her trunk fingers was poor, and the wiry grass blades evaded her. Silverhair could see that even when Wolfnose managed to drag a fingerful from the hard, frozen ground and cram it in her mouth, much of the crushed grass spilled from her mouth, and a greenish juice trickled over her lower lip.

Silverhair tenderly reached forward and tucked the grass back into Wolfnose’s mouth.

Wolfnose was so old now that the two great molars in her jaw — her last set — were wearing down, and soon they would no longer be able to perform the job of grinding her food for her. Then, no matter what the Family did for her, Wolfnose’s ribs and backbone would become even more visible through her sagging flesh and clumps of hair. And, if the wolves spared her, her rheumy eyes would close for the last time.

It would be a time of sadness. But it was as it had been since the days of Kilukpuk.

Wolfnose was mumbling even as her great jaw scraped ineffectually at the grass. "Too long," she said. "Too long."

"Too long since what?" Silverhair asked, puzzled.

"Since the last birth. That whining Bull-calf who’s always under my feet—"

"Croptail."

"Too long…"

Mammoths do not have clocks, or wristwatches, or calendars; they do not count out the time in arbitrary packages of seconds and days and years, as humans do. Nevertheless, the mammoths know time on a deep level within themselves. They can measure the slow migration of shadows across the land, the turning faces of Arctic poppies, the strength of air currents. So massive are mammoths that they can feel the turn of the Earth on its axis, the slow pulse of the seasons as the Earth spins in its stately annual dance, making the sun arc across the sky. And so deep and long are their memories, they are even aware of the greater cycles of the planet. There is the Great-Year, the twenty-thousand-year nod of the precessing axis of the spinning planet. And the mammoths know even the million-year cycle of the great ice sheets, which lap against the mountains like huge frozen waves.

So Silverhair knew time. She knew how she was embedded in the great hierarchy of Earth’s rhythms.

And she knew that Wolfnose was right.

Wolfnose said, "One infant, and one half-starved calf. It’s not enough to keep the Family going, Grassfoot."

Grassfoot had been the name of Silverhair’s mother — Wolfnose’s granddaughter — who, when Silverhair was herself still an infant younger than Croptail was now, had died. Calling Silverhair "Grassfoot" was a mistake Wolfnose had made before.

"I know," said Silverhair sadly. "I know, Great-Grandmother." And, tenderly, she tucked more grass into the old Cow’s trembling mouth.

After a time Owlheart came forward. Her huge head loomed over Silverhair, so close that the Matriarch’s wiry hair brushed Silverhair’s brow. She pulled Silverhair away from Wolfnose.

"I know you’re no fool, child," rumbled Owlheart. "Sometimes I think you’re the smartest, the best of us all."

Silverhair was startled; she’d never been spoken to like that before.

"But," the Matriarch went on, "I want you to understand that there is nowhere so important for you to be, right now, as here, at the time of this, our first new birth for many seasons. Never mind headlands. Never mind plausible young Bulls, even. Do you know why you must be here?"

"To help my sister."

The Matriarch shook her great head. "More than that. You must learn. Soon you will be ready for estrus, ready for a calf of your own. And that calf will depend on you — for its whole life, at first — and later, for the lore and wisdom you can teach it. We don’t come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live. And it will be up to you to teach your calf. There is no greater responsibility. But you cannot teach if you do not learn yourself." Owlheart stepped back. "And if you do not learn, you will never become the great Matriarch I think you could be."